My First Talk at JAWS DAYS 2026
Introduction
I gave my first ever talk at JAWS DAYS 2026, held on March 7, 2026! I presented in the lunch session slot sponsored by my company.
It was a two-person session. My senior colleague kicked things off with a talk on “Ideal Onboarding,” sharing how our company approaches new-graduate training. I then took the baton as one of those new graduates and spoke about “Operational Reality,” focusing on how we split usage quotas for on-demand inference in Amazon Bedrock.
Preparing for the Talk
Everything was set up well in advance (from practice runs to slide reviews), which gave me plenty of breathing room. The experience taught me the value of locking in a schedule early.
The review process was eye-opening. Having my slides critiqued raised the overall quality dramatically, and I found that a well-polished deck gave me real confidence when presenting. Highly recommend not skipping it.
I originally planned to give a broad overview of Amazon Bedrock, but I narrowed it down to one central theme. That turned out to be the right call. Without a clear throughline, listeners struggle to follow along no matter how much knowledge you’re sharing. I also found it useful to watch archives of past JAWS DAYS talks for inspiration.
Some specific feedback from the review that I hadn’t thought about before:
- One message per slide
- Keep minor stylistic details consistent throughout
- When highlighting something in a photo, use a red border to draw the eye
These felt obvious in hindsight, but I genuinely hadn’t been thinking about them when building the deck.
For practice runs, I wrote a full script in the PowerPoint notes pane to keep my timing consistent. It took a while, but it was absolutely worth it.
The Day of the Talk
A lot of people came to listen, and it was a fantastic experience overall.
That said, I had built in about 30 seconds of buffer, but things ran a bit long and I ended up rushing through the final section. That’s my main regret from the day.
For next time, I want to keep in mind:
- Clarify whether the time limit includes the MC’s opening/closing remarks
- When the one-minute bell rings, don’t panic. You’re fine until the second bell
- Always close properly with “Thank you for listening”
- Prepare a compressed version of the last few minutes that can be cut down to about one minute if needed
The slides are available here if you’re curious:
Sessions I Attended
After my talk, I caught a few other sessions. Two stood out in particular:
“Visible,” “Exists,” and “Usable” Are All Different for S3 Storage Classes — Peering Into the Spec’s Depths Through Real Experience
This one dug into the quirks of restore behavior in S3 Glacier storage classes, the kind of edge-case behavior you rarely encounter until you need to. Really interesting deep dive.
AWS x Cloud-Native Software Design — Event-Driven Architecture That Lets You “Choose” Your Dependencies
My first proper introduction to event-driven architecture. Hearing how it applies at scale with AWS made it click in a way it hadn’t before, and it was genuinely exciting. The talk was great on its own, and the punchline that the slides were made in TAKT made it even better.
Closing
I’m really grateful to everyone who gave me this opportunity, helped me practice, and reviewed my slides. I hope to pay it forward and mentor the next generation of new grads in the same way.
I’m also thankful to the event organizers and everyone who came to listen. Thank you for listening!